Event Frequency
A common topic that I see discussed in many places is the frequency of events, that they can feel ‘spammy’ - not necessarily because there’s always too many of them at once (although that certainly happens every now and then), but because you often see the same events often. The more insignificant or punishing a (random) event is, the less often you want to see it happen. Having a flavorful situation appear now-and-then is fine, but being blocked by a challenger on the road or hearing a duck quack several times per character feels off.
Now, the method we have when creating ‘pools’ of content is to have a generous amount of events that have easy-to-happen triggers and can happen in many situations. This we do in order to make sure you’re always valid to see something. While making an event that triggers for a niche situation feels really good, the likelihood of it being seen at all drastically decreases the more complex the situation is, making it less and less valuable to spend time making - to the point where it might be half a percent or less of the playerbase who sees them. This means that we aim for way more ‘general’ events as a rule of thumb, a ratio between general and niche (which varies depending on the pool we’re filling). Of course, a consequence of this is that you’re going to see the events with easy-to-happen triggers way more often - sometimes with every character you play, and sometimes multiple times per character (depending on the event cooldown).
Reading your feedback I’m inclined to make some changes to our philosophy, and I’d appreciate further feedback on this before we make any decisions.
What we are looking at is a combination of more significant cooldowns and a new system to restrict certain events for some characters you play could have the following effects:
- Pro: You would see the same events way less often
- Pro: You would have more varied ‘general’ event content between characters
- Pro: ‘Rare’ events would become somewhat more visible, due to fewer ‘general’ events being valid
- Con: Some event pools might give you less event content over time (which might be a Pro for some of you)
I’d like to go into a bit more detail on how this would work. Generally, we use 5 or 10 years as the most common cooldown for events; they are the default go-to values. For events with easy-to-happen triggers, what we could do is simply increase this cooldown - this would make it so that there’s a significantly lower chance of seeing the same event multiple times with the same character. This wouldn’t hinder each of your successive rulers from seeing the events at least once though, which would limit its impact as a stand-alone measure. If we introduced a system where we could randomly make events valid or invalid for your character, say that an event would be valid for 50% of characters, then we’d be able to ensure that not all characters see the same events. For some we could have lower values, for others higher - it could be a judgment call based on what the event is, and its purpose.
Of course, these two measures would only be interesting to enable for certain types of events, and wouldn’t work to introduce for all events (for example, you need all lifestyle events to be valid so that you have ways of gaining XP). That said, I believe that this could help drastically reduce the issue of excessively frequent events. Let me know what you think.
